Emergency Visits at Night and During Holidays

We have been trying our best since we opened our hospital to provide round-the-clock, safe, and high quality medical treatment in our community as a core medical center in the Kawagoe area, providing highly advanced medical treatment as a medical education facility of Saitama Medical University. However, while we have the growing seriousness of a shortage of doctors who engage in the emergency services, including pediatrics, in Japan, we have rapid increase of primary emergency patients who visit us at night and during holidays, which creates problems in our medical care with “emergency patients who require prompt action” and “critically ill inpatients,” which is our primary role as a community medical center. If we keep doing what we are doing now, it would be difficult, not only to provide safe and high quality medical care to the inpatients require advanced and specialized medical care, but also to maintain our current emergency medical care at nights and during holidays.

To solve these problems, we would be able to provide advanced and specialized medical care even at night and holidays by sharing medical treatment with other medical facilities in the community.

To achieve this purpose, we need to establish rules for emergency patients to use the emergency facility dedicated for night and holidays, or other emergency hospitals on a rotating schedule as much as possible and patients who need highly specialized medical care need to receive a referral to us. This is a rule that corresponds with “a policy that promotes cooperation of hospitals and clinics” being promoted by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, by clarifying and sharing the roles of primary and secondary medical facilities, including clinics and tertiary medical facilities, including our hospital.

Therefore, we plan to charge an amount equivalent to the points specified by the overtime surcharge for the emergency patients visiting at night and during holidays, except for patients who require hospitalization, and patients who have a referral letter from other clinics to receive emergency medical care, for us to dedicate our medical care to the “emergency patients who require prompt action” and “inpatients”. We appreciate your understanding regarding these unavoidable circumstances, to provide safe and high quality medical care to the people in our community.

Please note that we plan to charge 8,000 yen (Excluding tax) for an overtime special charge.

Hospital Director